Rhonda Bracey: At Random

It’s a bleak sort of day today, so I decided to do some purging of a different kind – my LONG list of web bookmarks. How long? Just under 1000 links! That’s a serious problem.

First, I exported the bookmarks to an HTML file (in Firefox: Bookmarks > Organize Bookmarks, then File > Export to a bookmarks.html file). Then I ran Xenu Sleuth link checker over the file to find all the broken links. Then I manually checked the broken ones, fixing those I could and deleting those that lead nowhere – as well as deleting categories and links that were no longer relevant to where my life is at at the moment. So now I’m down to just under 700 over 900 links…

That’s as far as I’ve got so far. The next stage is to reorganise the links into better categories so that I don’t end up with a list of 50+ links in a category as broad as “Reference Material”! And to double check each link too as many that Xenu said it could find are now just placeholders for web hosting companies. So even though Xenu found a link, it may not be the link I saved way back when.

Of course, a simpler process might be to purge ALL my links right now and start afresh. Keep the exported bookmarks.html file in case there’s anything I need, but go back to a clean slate. Hmmmm… that option’s looking VERY attractive about now.